Typically, an employer offers employees benefits such as health insurance, health savings and reimbursement accounts, defined contribution retirement accounts, etc. Recently, employers have also started offering non-traditional benefits, such as wellness programs, discounts and various memberships. Wellness programs are offered to employees for various reasons, such as to improve employee health, reduce employee sick days and health related conditions, reduce employee absenteeism reduce employee health care costs overall, improve employee at-work productivity and to continue to be able to provide affordable health care coverage to employees. Wellness programs can include offering incentives or rewards to employees that participate in wellness activities or achieve certain wellness criteria. Incentives can be offered for completing such activities as health risk assessments, prevention activities, behavior modification programs, chronic condition management (management of diabetes or other conditions) or participating in health education programs (e.g., health fairs, seminars, individual or group counseling, and even online health resources). Prevention activities can include such activities as visiting doctors regularly or using risk identification tools such as biometric screenings including blood-pressure, cholesterol levels, body mass index, etc., or imaging technologies. Behavior modification programs can include health coaching, tobacco cessation, weight management, nutrition and diet, joining a gym, regular exercise, and workplace competitions/contests, etc. An incentive can be tied to indicators of success such as an employee's participation in, progress during, and/or completion of a program, or an employee attaining a certain health benchmark. For many employers, these same types of wellness programs have also been made available to the employee's spouses as well so that their activities can earn corresponding incentives as well.
Employers have generally provided for the systematic administration of typical benefits, allowing employees to sign up for each individual benefit separately, and/or allowing employees to manage each benefit via the benefit's particular system or website. As employers have started to provide non-traditional types of benefits, such as the ability to earn incentives described above, employers have yet to provide an efficient approach for administering these benefits and/or an approach that gives the employees sufficient interaction and control. Such non-traditional benefits, generally are paid out as cash or as a health care premium reduction, suffer issues of haphazard administration by employers and under-utilization by employees. Additionally, employers and/or plan sponsors do not currently give participants a choice of how to allocate their earned reward amounts or incentives. These shortcomings are also enhanced by the fact that current processes lack the ability to be customized to match the needs or interests of each particular employee. There is a need to give participants a choice of how to allocate their earned reward amounts or incentives to both increase the perceived value of the reward as well as to increase the participants' engagement in the behavior being incentivized. In addition, there is a need for an efficient system that allows the employee to manage his/her incentives in conjunction with other employee benefit programs such as health benefits, retirement benefits, 401(k) plans etc. in a manner that provides maximum benefit, appreciation, interaction, and understanding of a selected allocation of benefits.